From DiscoverNikkei.org

Kota Ezawa

Visual artist (b.1969)

Kota Ezawa was born in Cologne, Germany in 1969. He studied at Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf; San Francisco Art Institute, where he received his BFA; and Stanford University, where he received his MFA. Ezawa has shown his work at Artpace San Antonio, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Whitney Biennial. In 2006 he received the prestigious SECA Art Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Ezawa currently lives in San Francisco and teaches at the California College of Art.

Includes exhibition chronology and bibliography.
In this gallery presentation, Ezawa discusses paintings in the MOMA permanent collection by Cézanne, Duchamp, Malevich, Brancusi, Giacometti, and Martin Creed, along with his own video, The Simpson Verdict.

Exhibitions

"Mixing images from film and television, fiction and news, as well as the present and the past, Kota Ezawa reenergizes images dulled through repetition in a culture in which moving images are ubiquitous. His works are in the form of insistently flat animated renderings of scenes both infamous and familiar that remake the everyday as strange."
"Celebrating contemporary art in the Bay Area, the SECA Art Award exhibition presents work by five extraordinary artists — Sarah Cain, Kota Ezawa, Amy Franceschini, Mitzi Pederson, and Leslie Shows — who work with a diverse array of media and subject matter. The biennial award, sponsored by SFMOMA's SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) art interest group, recognizes local artists of exceptional promise."
Ezawa exhibited a short digital animation, Hardcore and Censored (2006–7), based on the widely circulated home porn–video by celebrities Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, along with still images from a recent series titled The History of Photography Remix, which recasts the work of photographers ranging from Ansel Adams to Nan Goldin in Ezawa's signature graphic format.
"Kota Ezawa Featured at SFMOMA thru 5/15". Hokubei News, January 30, 2007.
Ezawa exhibited his slide show installation, The History of Photography Remix (2005), an expansion of his 2004 slide installation titled On Photography. Originally conceived as a selection of twenty slides representing iconic photographs from the history of art, the work has evolved into a series of forty pictures drawn from a greater array of media sources including magazines and newspapers. Also exhibited: a new series of paper cutout collages, and Ezawa's recent film entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being (2005), depicting the assassinations of presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.
"For Lennon Sontag Beuys, the artist uses documentary footage of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 Amsterdam “bed-in” for peace, a 2001 lecture delivered by the late media philosopher Susan Sontag at Columbia University and Joseph Beuys’ 1974 lecture at the New School for Social Research in New York."
"Kota Ezawa’s installation uses vibrant colors and purposefully crude shapes in animated translations of actual archival footage of news conferences, public dialogues and lectures by Lennon, Sontag and Beuys. Rather than 'filter' the original film to look like animation, he uses computer software to digitally 'draw' the figures, and then re-creates all the original motions, gestures and mannerisms to simulate his three protagonists."
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